[drittich]

Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.

[lukevp]

And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.

We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.

It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.

[vharuck]

>And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.

But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.

I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.

[datsci_est_2015]

> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.

This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.

Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.

[JohnFen]

> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key.

Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.

> Banning the new types of art

Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.

[array_key_first]

Humans are humans, computer programs aren't. A computer program learning doesn't matter, and it's not comparable to human learning. I have no empathy, sympathy or any sort of allegiance to computer programs.

I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.

[flumpcakes]

> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.

[munificent]

> Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.

The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.

These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.

[butlike]

> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).

[gspr]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?

[eagleal]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

The volumes of production are really scales of magnitude of difference between a human producing music, and a computer.

With a script and generator 1 individual could oversaturate the whole marketplace overnight rendering it impossible for other individuals to be found let alone extract any value.

Also, I don't know if you've ever done music production for fun but you don't really just setup only a prompt. It takes a significant amount of time to actually produce something. Time setting up a DAW system and export an empty track, and submitting it. An empty track.

Let alone actually doing all the microoptimizations by ear and trial to produce any catchy tune. Meanwhile a statistical approach doesn't even have to understand what's it's doing, could as well be white noise for all it matters.

[leptons]

>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code

From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.

Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.

[isolli]

I think the analogy here is with Grok generating images of (real) people wearing bikini. It could always be done in Photoshop before (and with hand-made photo montages before that), but it's now accessible at scale to people with zero skill. That's when a quantitative change becomes qualitative.

[CJefferson]

Actually, to me this is the perfect argument to make AI music not have copyright.

Normally the copyright is owned by the creator. Algorithms can't own copyrights, so there is no copyright. There is already legal history on this.

[strangecasts]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't

[DamnInteresting]

> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle

It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.

[spopejoy]

> less gatekeepy to make music

Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"

[jccc]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

This is an argument that the AI should be allowed to benefit, not the person prompting it.

[wesleywt]

> Electronic music...

Your instrument is the computer and designing sound. You still have to have talent and musical ear to make this music.

[ComplexSystems]

It's really only about the flooding the marketplace part, not about the extracting volume without their consent part. The current set of GenAI music models may involve training a black box model on a huge data set of scraped music, but would the net effect on artists' economic situations be any different if an alternate method led to the same result? Suppose some huge AI corporation hired a bunch of musicians, music theory Ph. D's, Grammy winning engineers, signal processing gurus, whatever, and hand-built a totally explainable model, from first principles, that required no external training data. So now they can crowd artists out of the marketplace that way instead. I don't think it would be much better.

[airstrike]

but if no one is making Linkin Funk, can't I enjoy it just because it's made with AI?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH-BNwBV4EI

[yowlingcat]

Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?"

I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.

AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.

But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.

[butlike]

I'm starting to think more and more in my older age that being 'great' isn't a good thing. I might actually prefer being good. We'll see how that thought plays out though; give me a couple more years

[undeveloper]

> then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace

[dragandj]

IMHO, it would be solved by just making AI "art" un-copyrightable. Fine, make "AI art" as much as you wish. Sell and buy it as much as you please if you find it to your taste. BUT, you can NOT participate in organizations that take royalties from radio stations, TVs, movies, records, etc. for publishing, performance, etc.

[senko]

Wait until you hear about sampling...

[Gud]

“great artists steal”?

[Culonavirus]

Trickle-down economics with the "trickle" reduced to zero.

Why are people mad? Don't they understand that you can't stop progress? Fssss... /s

[mcpar-land]

Spotify has a history of intentionally boosting internally produced, royalty-free and/or AI music over actual artists.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

[sodapopcan]

> You're just mad that people actually like AI music.

Yes, I am! I'm also mad that people like shitty over-produced pop, though (including me sometimes), so what can you do. Life is shit.

[jesterswilde]

Curation is a real concern. 'Flooding the market' is bad for everyone, being seen is difficult as is. It's even harder in a slopstorm.

[Ritewut]

This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.

[array_key_first]

In order to find the stuff to listen to you have to... find it. If you had to wade through, say, 1 million AI generated books to find one that isn't, then ALL of your reading would be AI generated.

[lotsofpulp]

A sufficient proportion of junk can cause a market to fail, taking down "legitimate" or "quality" purveyors.

[alfalfasprout]

Yet your argument is deeply flawed too. Flooding the market with slop makes it much more difficult to discover genuine, quality, art from smaller creators.

ad hominem has no place on HN.

[northzen]

> It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.

What do you think about The Prodigy?

[yowlingcat]

I didn't even think about the analogy to sampling (and the prior controversy) but that is an even better analogy. Ultimately, the different between what's creative re-use and what's a ripoff is a matter of how skillfully it's done and there's a lot of controversy in the middle!